Let’s face it, in such questions as race, class, and gender, Emerson wrote some really mean and dumb things. Should he be cancelled? Well, to be factual, Emerson already cancelled himself. In his 1836 essay Nature — often credited with beginning the transcendentalist movement — Emerson wrote,
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?*
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/nature.html
Forget presentism: Emerson’s Big Idea cancels just about everything thought and written before right now, doesn’t it? In this he was much like Guy Debord of the Situationists who imagined a book with covers made of sandpaper in order to erase the books shelved nearby.
No, Emerson did not think that all previous human thinking should be discarded. Previous human thought should not, however, interfere with each person’s experience of reality — here, now.
The way to avoid that is to examine our thoughts and concepts. How many of our own thoughts have come to us from “insight” and not “tradition”? How much of our religious thinking springs from “revelation” rather than “history”?
Cliche and autopilot are the great enemies of transcendentalist thought.
Emerson cancelled himself. But we don’t tend to remember that. We do well to remember, then do the hard work of creating and thinking anew, and thus create our own,
poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
revelation to us, and not the history of theirs